Yesterday we shipped 3.1.2 with an update to fix new WordPress update errors with MyStyle plugin’s initial activation.

WordPress “Sandbox Security” Checks Caused New Bugs

WordPress shipped an update recently that includes a new “Sandbox for Security” feature that essentially runs plugin code, which can include front-end code, in the admin in a new way of pre-checking for errors. But, in fact it causes some errors, too, since front-end run time code can sometimes rely on non-admin page variables, and won’t be able to find them in the admin. This probably effects a lot of plugins who will have to do the same sort of patches we’ve just done.

Fixes Are Live

In any case, we’ve patched up the issues with this new WordPress change and everything should work fine now. Strangely this only seemed to affect some systems and not others, but for whatever reason activating the plugin would cause an error in this pre-check that would gallivant thru the admin notifications like an actual Fatal Error would occur if enabled, when really there was no error once activated at all. In any case, we’ve adapted to the new checks and fixed this issue in our latest release of the MyStyle Custom Product Designer plugin for WordPress / WooCommerce.

Here’s the official release notes:

v3.1.2 of the main WP plugin

* Bug Fix: Fixed a bug with our design profile shortcode and WP 4.9’s new Sandbox for Safety feature.
* Updated the readme.txt to reflect that the plugin is compatible with up to WordPress 4.9.2.

We’re booked solid until at least February, and we’re now closed for the Holidays. We can estimate projects for February start dates but will not have any start dates nailed down until the new year. January start dates will require our standard RUSH dev rates (+50%), and February start dates will be normal pricing.

Customer service will be open for our retail sites and for urgent matters, but closed otherwise until the new year. We will be completely closed from the 24th to the 28th for anything except service outages or downtime. For critical issues like that please contact your account manager or Sean directly if they are out of office.

Wow what a year! This has been a year of major change and transition for lots of companies, both partners and clients, as well as ourselves. We’re happy to say numbers have really been popping this holiday in both versions of our app, with our mobile / html5 app now reaching all-time high design complete ratios, powering some of the highest sales ratios of all time!

Wow, the holidays is really living up to it’s reputation this year with huge spikes in conversion across all personalization enabled sites!
With this comes a couple more bug fixes. Here’s a recap of the last couple updates to the WordPress plugin. For this update, you can just press “update” on the plugin in your wordpress admin and auto-update.

MyStyle Custom Product Designer (Main WP Plugin) Changelog

3.1.1

Security bug: Fixed a security bug where private designs were being listed on the design gallery/index.

3.1.0

Now gracefully handling no WooCommerce situations.

You can now set an alternate design complete url.

Updated the readme.txt to reflect that the plugin is tested with up to WP 4.8.3.

You may have noticed the green lock in our address bar signifying a secure URL, because we’ve gone fully secure with our whole website as well as all of our HTML5 and Render apps!

Fully SSL Support for All Customizers and Now All Website Services

MyStyle HTML5 Customizer in all of our flavors of WordPress WooCommerce plugins, OpenCart and Magento plugins, etc all support full HTTPS connections (SSL websites). This is a standard some of our development teammates such as IBM have urged us to move forward with and we are happy to say we’ve completed that transition. You can now use our HTML5 customizer on any fully SSL (https://) website, rather than http://, and this has been available in testing for months, but now we’ve also followed suit with our website and our website based services, too. With this change we’re now forwarding all http:// traffic to the https:// URL instead, with the exception of some special case URLs for legacy Renderer users.

Google and IBM Strongly Recommend It.

This standard was also suggested by Google as the new standard for all websites to move to using for their entire websites, not just the traditional usage we’ve typically used where we only use SSL for checkout and register/login (where passwords or sensitive data is used). As far as standards go, partners like Google and IBM are definitely two we like to trust and generally heed their advice!

Test Your Sites and Workflows

Please test your sites and log a ticket for any issues you may encounter on your own sites while switching to https:// with regard to our HTML5 Customizer and Print Image Renderer, and we’ll be happy to help you with the transition. For most sites, it should be as easy as changing your site to SSL and our updated plugins will automatically follow suit if the outer site is SSL.

SSL Is Recommended, but Not Required

If you’re not using an SSL website yourself, that’s ok, too. Your site can use regular http:// and our apps will adopt that protocol and use our own secure calls in the background.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who has helped us Q/A during the transition and all of our clients who made the jump to SSL right away.

The MyStyle team is excited to announce a minor change in the code but a major update for the plugin. The plugin will now use our HTML5 Customizer by default, as opposed to the Flash customizer. This marks the official deprecation of the Flash version and strong recommendation to update your MyStyle plugins and switch your own Customizer apps entirely over to HTML5.

You’ll see the Settings tab switched to say “Enable Flash (Not Recommended)”. Make sure this is NOT checked to always use HTML5.

Our team has been working around the clock to update our HTML5 customizer with new standards for mobile usability and the core feature list from our legacy Flash Customizer. We’re happy to say that between our new versions of the HTML5 Customizer and Renderer combined we are now printing at higher resolutions than ever with the SVG and JPG formats with 300dpi and vector quality.

Big updates here! We have just released version 2.2.0 of the MyStyle Design Manager to support our newest product, the MyStyle Print Studio (available for Standard and Managed License holders only). You will now see “Render” links that will forward to the Print Studio. The Print Studio will allow you to live edit and download your print file in JPG or vector SVG. Even though this one update is small, it is part of a huge milestone of MyStyle officially switching to an all device friendly customizer, making it better for everyone!

All legacy designs which have a print file from the Flash customizer will still see the “Print” file link to download the JPG.

MyStyle is now booked for all custom projects through 2017. We are still accepting sales inquiries and calls and are currently booking new projects starting January 2018.

Custom projects are for clients that require a new website, custom features, a special checkout flow, etc. If you do not need our custom development services, you can get the MyStyle Customizer on your website at anytime as long as you have a WordPress/WooCommerce website. You can purchase a license as well as custom templates and you can get up and running on your own.

Rush & Priority Rush Options

If your project is time sensitive and you’d like to get it live before the holiday season, we are currently offering Rush (+50%) and Priority Rush (+100%) options. Rush rates are $149/hour and Priority Rush rates are $199/hour.

We’ve just released a minor update for the plugin that verifies unit tests have passed on the most current WordPress and WooCommerce versions as listed below. There is also a fix for an admin debug tool for repairing the design pages for an old legacy bug that rarely occurs.

Update Overview

This update is not critical or required if your system is already stable, but is safe to use with all versions of WordPress and WooCommerce.

Fixed an issue with the Design Profile Page Fix tool.

Unit tested current wordpress version and ran primary UX cases with no errors (WordPress 4.8)

Unit tested current WooCommerce version and ran primary UX cases with no errors (WooCommerce 3.1)

Updated readme.txt to reflect that the plugin has been tested with up to WP 4.8.0

Updated readme.txt to reflect that the plugin has been tested with up to WooCommerce 3.1.1

Bug Fixes for Reloaded Designs and Add-to-Cart with Dynamic Pricing

Non-Critical Update

This update is not mandatory, but it’s a good idea to stay up to date with the MyStyle plugin releases just in case. No rush, but when you can, it’s recommended you update to current if you’re using the WP plugin or the Email Manager add-on.

Update Both Plugins, Auto vs Manual

Please note that the main plugin can be updated from your WP admin by just pressing “update”, but as with all of our Add-Ons, they must be downloaded here from our website and installed manually into your plugins section by de-activating and deleting the old plugin, then uploading the new plugin zip file and activating it with the Activate link. Since all of our Add-Ons are a manual-update, they will not show an update link or any notice about a new version being available in your admin. To check this, simply look at the version number on your MyStyle Email Manager Add-on plugin in the list, and see if it’s 2.0.2 or higher. If not, you need the update!

We recently released version 2.0.2 of the MyStyle Custom Product Designer plugin for WordPress / WooCommerce. This update addresses compatibility issues with the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing plugin by Lucas Stark and saved designs being re-added to cart later with custom options and custom pricing on the product.

How to Update

Third Party Plugin Updates Warning: We do not recommend updating all plugins. Updating the MyStyle plugin alone should be enough to remedy this issue, and updating all other plugins may lead to unwanted conflicts with other third party plugins. Always update plugins with caution and only after making a backup.

UPDATE 5/31/2017: We have released 2.0.1 which patches some issues being caused by the plugin/add-on load order which we have no control over. In my dev environment, the design manager was loading second and then it worked. In v2.0.1 (of all of our add-ons) I updated the code so that it will work regardless of the plugin load order.
Original Post Below:

Today we released a highly anticipated update for the MyStyle Custom Product Designer plugin and all its related MyStyle add-ons that make them compatible with numerous 3rd party technology updates including:

WooCommerce 2.X

WooCommerce 3.X

WordPress 4.7.X (tested up to 4.7.5 5/30/2017)

PHP 5.X

PHP 6.X

PHP 7.X

Major Version 2.0 Across All Plugins

To keep things in sync we’ve updated to major revision number 2.0.0 for our main WordPress plugin (MyStyle Custom Product Designer). This is a distinct change to many of the hooks and programming methods that were previously used in WooCommerce 2.X.

This includes:

MyStyle Custom Product Designer

Design Manager add-on

Email Manager add-on

Order Queue add-on

This means any MyStyle plugin with version 2.0 or higher will be compatible with the current WooCommerce version (3.0.7) or older, and will most likely stay compatible with WooCommerce’s upcoming minor revisions and updates since their 3.X changes were also a major update that cleaned and refactored significant internal core programming and should last them years with their new structure.

Dev Notes

Here’s a few words on things to note from our senior WP developer:

v2.0.0 of the plugins supports WooCommerce 3.0.x and PHP 7.0.x. They are backwards compatible and still support WooCommerce 2.x.x and PHP 5.3-6.
Since the main plugin is backwards compatible with the old versions of the add-ons, older versions of php and WooCommerce 2.x, everyone should be able to upgrade all of our MyStyle add-on plugins without issues.
It should be noted however, that the change-variations-in-cart plugin and product add-ons plugin aren’t yet compatible with WC 3.x or PHP 7. So sites using these plugins should stay on WC 2.x and PHP 5.x for now.
It should also be noted that many other plugins from other companies don’t yet support WC 3.x and PHP 7, so updating even when not running the above two plugins should be done with care.

SSL Support

The HTML5 app now supports SSL out of the box in BETA form. If you are in need of an https:// (SSL) solution for your website, use the checkbox to force HTML5 only to test out SSL support!

Update Your Site if Using WooCommerce 3.X

Be sure to update your site plugins accordingly if you’re using WooCommerce 3.X or higher.

We recently released MyStyle Custom Product Designer plugin version 1.7 for wordpress / woo commerce. You can update right in your WP Admin by clicking update on the plugin.

Bot Sessions Saving in DB

As usual, bots are ruining nice things on the internet. Because of the large amount of bot traffic (including both legit bots like search engine bots, monitoring bots, etc and also spambots and hackerbots and such) session data to track user designs may have increased the database table sizes significantly, depending on how your site is set up to block bots or not. In some cases, the tables were very very large having stored hundreds of thousands of bot sessions. This was discovered in versions less than 1.7 in May 2017 and quickly fixed. With version 1.7 design sessions will only be stored upon design completion, and the database will be automatically purged of old bot session data. If the table sizes grow large enough, it could cause poor performance on the website (slowing down website response time).

Fixed in 1.7 with Auto-Clean-Up

MyStyle Custom Product Designer v1.7 and higher will automatically clean up old session data in the DB, purging it entirely to shrink the table size. New sessions will not be stored for bots, keeping things small and clean.

1.7+ Update Recommended

If you are using the MyStyle Custom Product Designer for WordPress / WooCommerce and have a version less than 1.7, we highly recommend updating to 1.7 to auto-clean your session data from the DB and prevent bots from slowing down your database.

Many people do not realize that we can change the color palette to be a custom color palette for any app. So, instead of the default color palette containing our standard set of common web colors, you can have your own set of colors for users to choose from.

Where Are The Color Palettes?

Color palettes can be found in the solid Background color UI, the Background Fade (Gradient) UI, the Edit-Text UI, Edit Monogam UI, Patterns UI, and special UIs for things like frame colors, vehicle paint colors, etc. Basically, anywhere the user can choose a color for something in their design.

How is This Useful?

If you or your manufacturer or fulfillment partner uses a CMYK printer, as most do, you may want to use a CMYK color palette to be sure that users are not able to select colors that are only possible in the RGB color space. Generally speaking, this means RGB colors are so bright and saturated on screen where there is light projecting the color to that extra bright range, that they generally cannot be printed with traditional CMYK printers.

Curated Colors

Some sites use a curated color palette where they have hand selected a set of colors they know work well with their products, and match well with each other, and can be printed well.

Conversely, if you know certain colors do not work well for your products or your printer, you can use a custom color palette to be sure you can’t use them!

Where to Buy

If you need a new UI entirely or complex color palette, or if you have a Standard or Managed license, talk to your account manager about what’s best for your site.

If you have a Developer License and want this upgrade with a set of color codes you have yourself, you can find this upgrade in the MyStyle Marketplace:

Please be aware that we recently put out an update v 1.6.1 of the MyStyle Custom Product Designer plugin for WordPress / WooCommerce. This release fixes a critical error in the mystyle handoff (present in version 1.6.0 only) flow that would prevent a design from being saved to the website or cart, but it would send the saved email to the author anyway. With version 1.6.1 this error is fixed.

This release was put out the same day that the bug in version 1.6.0 was reported. Thanks to Eugene for finding and posting the bug in the forum first immediately after the first release so that we could fix it and put out the next update quickly.

Who This Effects

If you have < 1.6.0 or you have 1.6.1 or higher, this will not effect you. You can safely continue to use the version you have, or download the WordPress marketplace version (1.6.1 or higher) and either way you should be stable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone who updated between the two releases, but the fix was out really fast so it did not have time to show up on most sites.

Side Note: WordPress 4.7.1 fixes 61 WordPress Bugs

Let this be a lesson for ANY plugin, not just MyStyle, to always wait a day or two after a new release for any initial bug reports to come in and be fixed to avoid being the first one to discover an issue! Nobody likes to admit that bugs occasionally get shipped, but even in the most professional release processes in the most professional companies, the occasional bug slips thru the cracks, and the NEXT update is usually the fix for any round 1 issues. This is also true with WordPress itself. Just look at version 4.7.1 out now, it fixes 61 bugs that were present in their more major release of 4.7.0, and that’s the leading most widely tested platform in the world. We waited on 4.7.0 and jumped on 4.7.1, and we’re glad we did :)

We are still buzzing from the awesome response we saw in 2016 and very excited about 2017. We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t for many of our users this past year, and we’ll be working hard to bring awesome features, upgrades, and optimizations to the MyStyle Platform that will help set everyone up for success that much more.

Enterprise Clients: New Capabilities in the Custom Developments Lab

We’ve got some really great new capabilities that are not available out of the box or in our current demos. If you are an Enterprise Client, please contact us here for a demo and quote for your project, and ignore our other pricing, as you will most likely do best with a custom solution.

Developers: New $99/yr Annual License for Developers

One major change is our entry level pricing. We’ve tried a lot over the years – free trials, up front charges, payment plans, monthly, yearly, high, low, we’ve tried it. Each time we’ve adjusted our service levels or features to match while trying to both open up access to a wider audience at a lower price point, while also requiring the features that we know are critical to success in the personalization space. This year, we’re making a change that we know will help. LOWER monthly pricing for entry level developer licenses when you purchase a year license will now replace our monthly developer Alpha license. This will really not affect any existing clients, Standard or Managed license clients, only the Developer license.

Why? Because We’re Setting DIY-Developers Up for Success, Not a 30 Day Demo.

This is for good reason, though, and one that is not obvious at first. For one, it’s a lower monthly cost in the end, our lowest yet, and for the bootstrap startup or unfunded business, that’s always a good thing. But, we do require for the new $8.25/mo developer license that you purchase for a year.

Why? Well, in a nutshell because people are slow and underestimate everything. Every day people sign up monthly and start their integration of MyStyle – very quickly, they’re up and running with a custom product, definitely within a week or two, in most cases. But, the website still says “Just Another WordPress Website”. Guess what – it stays that way for way too long, and that’s common. Now, you’re being rebilled for the customizer and yet you’re still in development. How many times have you purchased something and not actually used it for a couple months? It’s more common than you’d think, and really for most businesses who are looking for the cheap solutions, they’re doing everything themselves to save money around every corner, and that’s going to make things take a while – months in most cases.

Then, after months and months of development, fine tuning things, getting too busy to work on it, getting back around to it, finishing it up enough to a lunch, they do launch and… Nothing! Because the marketing hasn’t started yet. But, everything is working so that’s great – except 6 months has gone by and now you’re just getting your first traffic and your first sales, and your SEO is starting to catch hold. By the time you get from this point to the point you want to be at, selling multiple transactions every single day, it’s going to take 6 months to a year without funding or an advertising budget to jumpstart things. Thus, the cheapest possible license as a monthly commitment is already setting up unrealistic expectations for the website itself, not our plugin! We’re so much easier to implement than finishing the rest of the website, it’s crazy. Thus, entry level monthly commitments are really doing no favors for anyone if it’s cancelled a few months later because the website itself is still not done and the whole system hasn’t had time to run it’s course.

If you’re a lone unfunded business owner or developer working on your project with no funding, you’re going to need 6 months to a year to get this right, see the usage, see the sales, make some adjustments, and get things selling well, and you’re going to need your MyStyle app to be a 1-and-done thing that buys you a year of growth before you have to even think about it again. We know this will result in less signups, but you know what, we don’t care because what we want is to help people SUCCEED, not just spend $10 and quit too early, as is far too common these days on the web. With a year commitment, even WE have some time to help you get things right without having to charge you an arm and a leg to point you in the right direction, and we’re already in personalization for the long haul – so welcome aboard!

So, the new developer price is now $99/yr, and it’s really in everyone’s best interest to jump into the year commitment so there is realistically ample time to develop, launch, grow, optimize, and see the full potential of MyStyle even though you, like all of us these days, are busy and are going to probably need all year to generate the sales and growth you’ll really be happy with. We really feel strongly that if DIY developers stick with it for a year, just a commitment of a year, they will almost always see the plugin perform wonderfully and make their money back and generate sales better than normal. This is going to encourage people to commit longer and in that extra time, as MANY successful entrepreneurs will tell you, it’s sticking with it beyond the point where everyone else would have normally given up and quit that makes you succeed where everyone else failed! So, forget a month, that’s for amateurs! Sign up today for the year, save a little money, and let’s have a year of successful launches and growth!

Crazy news today that some of the biggest sites on the internet are down today, but we’re still up with no downtime!

The sites that have been or are still down today include:

PayPal

Twitter

Ebay

Netflix

Etsy

Visa

Reddit

Github

+ MANY MORE

…And of course we can’t forget the target themselves, Dyn.com

This massive outage is the biggest in years, maybe the biggest ever, and is a result of a huge DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the Dynamic DNS provider company (Dyn) that they rely on to point their domain name to their sites and services.

MyStyle Cloud: No Outages!

We use both Amazon and Rackspace services and experienced no outage at all. Props to our ops team, Rackspace infrastructure teams, and especially to Amazon AWS and for bouncing back from this attack FAST after Amazon was also hit. Even though Amazon’s retail site was reported to having some connectivity issues and downtime for their own well known Amazon.com retail site Friday morning, our services and uptime has been 100% through the storm, and we are happier than ever to be using their infrastructure. Great job Amazon AWS!

Amazon, Maybe the Most Experienced History of Dealing With DDoS

Perhaps their professional and super fast handling of the situation comes from their history having been one of the victims of some of one of the first really major mainstream DDoS attacks way back in 2000. They’ve been dealing with this sort of attack since then for over 15 years now, and also showed that experience in 2010 when Anonymous tried to take down their network after Amazon decided to cut off WikiLeaks from their services over leaked State Department documents. That attack showed the world that Amazon’s infrastructure was so massive it could actually handle the load of the attack, just like it handles the massive traffic of the holidays for millions of people every day.

Knowing this, DDoS attacks against Amazon are almost pointless, because if Anonymous can’t DDoS hard enough to take down Amazon, really almost nobody can. So, this time the attackers targeted a service provider for DNS to cut off some of Amazon’s sites and many networks rather than attack the networks themselves. The ironic part is that the company taken down that caused all of the sites’ outages, Dyn, provides this service as a way for these major sites IP addresses to always be changing, something that helps prevent these sort of attacks in the first place by frequently changing the address. It’s a smart move on the attackers part, to go over these massive networks’ heads to cut off power right by the switch, so to speak, but Amazon has pivoted and handled the outage so quickly, that the strategy it doesn’t seem to have a lasting effect on them. PayPal, Twitter, and many others are still down, however, even though they have massice technical resources, showing how good the Amazon Ops team and network really is.

Use Our Managed Program and Join Our Infrastructure

If you’re already in our managed program and elected to use our infrastructure, you’re good to go! You can proudly report that you have had no downtime today :) If not, contact us and let’s get you set up!

Your Customized Wood Frames

With its unique blend of smooth grain, photos on wood have become an artistically beautiful way to share memories with friends and family. Plakthat.com has established itself as a leading business for custom design wood photos fit for any building or wall background it adjusts too. Personalized photos on wood steers away from the mundane canvas art and attracts an antique, natural looking setting against any background of choice. Coincided with the MyStyle Customizer, plakthat.com offers an array of personalized options for your creation to come to life.

Synthesize a Captured Photo on Wood

What’s extraordinary about any wood photo is that each wood grain can never be a replicate. This is what differentiates the product amongst other competitors and customers love the fact that it resembles a rustic setting. Each is handcrafted specifically with 100% FSC certified sustainable wood which is where the real nature feel comes to life. On the MyStyle Customizer affects can be changed and managed on any wood photo created. All wood photos allow an escape from the generic store bought brands where the Customizer allows for add in text, color changes, fades, frames, designs, and much more.

Personalization has never become more accessible than with the MyStyle Customizer especially when designing one’s own wood photos. A choice of seven frame sizes is available then the rest is up to your imagination. A four step process is presented to you through the Customizer which allows each customer to modify his/her wood print any way possible. Add photos from a special occasion like a wedding, birthday, anniversary or vacation then jet off into your own creative side. Try adding in meaningful texts then color coding the print with your office space at home. Wherever your mind takes you MyStyle Customizer has the tools for your unique frame.

Since being launched as one of the top quality fly discs’ customizer, FlyDiscs.com has changed the game of designing one’s personal disc golf discs. With its innovative features, creating custom disc golf discs has never been easier. When you design your own disc golf disc the customer is unveiled by the MyStyle Customizer which allows full disc designs so you can add your own images, text, colors, patterns, effects, and more.

Pick from Professionally Crafted Discs

With the art and design of creating your own custom disc golf discs it is imperative the discs meet professional standards. Using the MyStyle Customizer features, FlyDiscs.com offers four brands of dics all critical elements when playing the game. You have the option to choose between creating a driver, midrange, putter or standard ultimate frisbee. With each customizer option comes versions of each brand to pick from. Like for the midrange you have the option to choose from six different subcategories of midranges spanning from the Latitude 64 Gold Core disc to the top seller Fuzion Truth disc. It doesn’t stop there with the added enhanced description of why each disc varies and gives further information on specific strengths it offers to your game.

Design Your Own Disc Golf Disc

With the complete four step process you can construct your ideal fly disc in minutes. It starts with background features which includes colors, shades, logos, patterns, and adjustable features. Then moves into add in personal photos and texts which can look great together or separate. Scan the browse page for unique ideas that customers are saying look best on a disc golf disc. Once your creation is complete and you’ve saved your desired disc, buying and checking out never got simpler. With its elite status as a customizer flydiscs.com is changing its reputation as an online disc ecommerce website that each player has to check out!

Many people like MyStyle for the quality look and feel that it brings to the personalization experience. It looks professional, clean, and it’s able to be customized with your branding, and the UIs move and behave smoother and more intuitively than other apps. That’s great, and it never hurts to look good.

Still, MyStyle has a lot to offer in the UX beyond the smooth UI and graphics that other apps just can’t seem to get right, that are a big part of it’s high completion and conversion rates for design – something that can be a point of failure for users that have little or no experience with design or graphics.

With tons of experience over the last decade, we’ve learned where to expose features to the user, and where to hide them away and make them automatic functionality.

Layers as a Concept

Layers is something that unless you’ve used a graphics editor, you probably are not that familiar with. Once you know how they work in Photoshop, or Illustrator, or whatever graphics software you might use that support it, it’s logical and easy. But, that initial learning curve is tough at first without a tutorial or a person teaching how to use them. Many developers will aim to try to copy Photoshop in UX because they themselves are familiar with it’s vocabulary and UX metaphors, but that’s actually a big mistake.

Hide the Concept for Usability, Automate the Functionality for Design Success
Since MyStyle caters to the common online shopper who is often non-technical when it comes to design and graphics, “Layers” as a concept must be implemented and functional the whole time the user is designing, but it has to be hidden away from the user’s experience to make it smooth and easy without that learning curve. This doesn’t mean it’s not there, though. It just means it’s running behind the scenes instead of competing visually in the UI controls for attention, like Photoshop, the way many apps make the mistake of doing.

There are an unlimited number of layers with sophisticated groupings automatically set up and generating and removing within the both the product template and the user’s design object layers. You can find “bring to front” and “send to back” buttons in the adjustments panel for any object to work with layering, but it’s not required and in most cases isn’t needed. Groupings of the layers ensure that text can’t get stuck behind images, that backgrounds are always in the background, that patterns fit in the middle, uploads go on top of background and patterns, monograms in front of that, and so on.

This automatic layer control makes the design process easy for the user, ensures logical and common composition ordering occurs naturally, and allows users to compose dozens of layers without ever having to hear the word “layer” once.

Dynamic Process of Composition

Composition is the process of combining and layering graphics together within a defined space. This seems obvious enough, and with computers the rules have definitely changed, but the roots go back to drawing and painting and still hold true today with computer graphics. MyStyle has made a 1-2-3-4 step composition process that accomplishes the natural back-to-front approach starting with the lowest possible UX barriers to entry. This linear UX makes the question “what should I do next” a sort of non-issue, because everyone gets that “steps” go in order. At the same time, you can click any step at any point, so you don’t have to go in order. While simpler users will just follow the order of the steps as is and do great, more advanced users will try to click steps out of order more often, and quickly discover that they can still work in any order they want, should they want to go back and change something up, or skip ahead to a feature they want immediately.

A Good Composition Starts with a Background You Like
Any good painting starts with with a color palette and laying down background. In the beginning of the MyStyle apps intro, it shows an animated arrow to the main composition steps, pointing at Step 1 – Backgrounds, in most cases. This gives the user instant gratification to play around with some color choices, either solid or a gradient from one color to another, and requires zero content on their part. As they move through background images, patterns, etc, they already get to see how easy it is for them to control their design and steer it into the realm of their personal tastes.

From here the Upload Images and Add Text features come into play for most users, as steps 2 and 3, layering perfectly and auto positioning as they go, to try to automate as much of the tedious obvious chores of a composition intuitively without too much intervention needed.

As a Result, the composition a user comes up can surprise them, as they often get further along artistically with more elements than they’ve ever done before. For many people who are not photoshop users, this is the first time they’ve done a cool gradient, a photo or image, a pattern, some text or a monogram all together in one composition.

Dynamic Steps
The steps in MyStyle can be configured to go in any order at all, so the app is not stuck in it’s default configuration, although the default configuration does use the back-to-front composition that works really well. So, if your product does not have a background ever, or your users 100% just want to start with an uploaded image for whatever reason, then steps can be removed or re-ordered however it needs to be to fit the demographic and primary use cases best.

Unique Trending Features

It’s not uncommon for the MyStyle dev team to create both hot new features for the out-of-the-box customizer, as well as custom features for specific MyStyle apps and clients. This can add a special element to your app that you think will fit your users or your products needs more specifically than the general design tools already do.

Note: You can find lots of great add-ons in the MyStyle Marketplace to add special elements to your MyStyle apps.

Some unique custom features we’ve developed in the past have included:

Custom Color Palettes

Custom Pattern Libraries

Custom Product Navigation

3D Rendering / Preview

Acrylic Frame Customizations

Changing Template Size Options & Shapes

Patterns; special size scaling and/or repeating patterns

Gloss and Matte finish lighting effects

Price calculations (based on sq ft of actual design area used)

Laser and Engraving output

Filters

Custom Monogram Shapes

Custom Fonts

Custom Background Libraries

Custom Foreground Libraries

Product Option Overlays (like a photographic options that can be toggled on or off to layer on top of the design as predefined add ons)

Special Vehicle Trims

Special Templates with Predefined Text

Effects Layers and Textures

Custom Watermarks and Overlays

…many more

The Tip of the Custom Iceberg

These concepts are some of the core of why the MyStyle Customizer is so good at what it does. But, the list goes on and on. This is the base that you want in place for users to have design success, and fall in love with your brand for the ability to take products to a personalized and special level with great up-front features and tons of hidden automated power and functionality at their fingertips. Beyond this, the sky is the limit on how we can customize our customizer further to take your brand to the top of conversion optimization and user satisfaction with the best UX possible for customized configurations and personalized prints.

The hockey pucks on PuckStyle are custom printed in full color with the customer’s design. The customer is able to use the MyStyle Customizer to design the custom puck with their own images, logos, text, monograms, colors, patterns, effects, and more. We’ve made what is probably the most advanced custom hockey puck designer on the web!

The custom puck is a two-sided product that can be chosen to have either a 1 or 2 sided print. When a user is on the product detail page, they can choose whether they would like a 1 or 2 sided print on the puck. While in the customizer, you can design both sides, or just one side and leave the other side blank. Once in the shopping cart, the product option for 1 or 2 sides can be changed for any last minute up-sells to 2 sides.

Legit Official Game Pucks

The founders of PuckStyle are 2 guys who know hockey well – a pro hockey player currently playing in Europe, and a hockey coach here in the USA. They promise quality pucks that pass size and weight and bounce test standards. With PuckStyle yo9

New update to the MyStyle Custom Product Designer just went out to the WP Plugin Marketplace.

Highlights

One common bug with the newest versions of WordPress + WooCommerce was that new resposnive resolution image features were overriding the product image in the cart. This has been fixed so that the customized product image is now what shows as the thumbnail again, as usual / expected.

Updates

Updated the author from mystyle to mystyleplatform.

Fixed bug with the thumbnail image in latest WP (caused by srcset attribute).

Now validating the mystyle product options.

Fixed some WP Coding Standards issues with some of the test files.

Added more sophisticated notices system.

Fixed some CSS issues with the admin screens in the latest WP and fixed a typo in a CSS name.

Updated the readme.txt to reflect that WP 4.4.1 is fully tested and working.

Get the Update

To get the update, simply log into your WP Admin > Plugin list and click “update” on the MyStyle Plugin.

If you update manually on your server, download the lastest release from the wordpress plugin marketplace, and replace the previous mystyle plugin with the plugin files/directory in your wp-content/plugins directory (standard WP Plugin structure).

Use Custom Car Wraps to Create Custom Fleet Graphics and Fleet Wraps!

Custom Car Wraps, the #1 site for car wraps and vehicle wraps, is proud to announce that you can now get fleet graphics and fleet wraps! Use the Custom Car Wraps car wrap designer to create the perfect vinyl wrap design and then use that design as the mockup for your fleet graphics. By partnering with VMS, the leading fleet wrap and vehicle graphics company in the industry, Custom Car Wraps has taken fleet graphics to an entirely new level.

The Same Fleet Graphics Used By Major Fleet Management Providers

Because Custom Car Wraps runs on the MyStyle Platform this partnership has allowed anyone looking for fleet graphics to use the exact same technology and design software that is used by the major fleet management companies. Add any of your logos or business information to your wrap, save multiple designs, and use multiple vehicle models to get the exact look you’re going for with your fleet advertising. After you’ve created the perfect look for your vehicle fleet you can send your designs and all the information about your fleet directly to us for a quote. We have a proven and dedicated and process for handling fleet graphics and now you can get that same level of dedication to your fleet graphics directly from Custom Car Wraps!

One our favorite customization sites is our original “design your own iPhone case” online app called Case Monkey. Featuring all the latest models of iPhone from the original iPhone cases to the latest iPhone cases we keep Case Monkey up to date with the latest in iPhone personalization. You can upload your own pictures and get your own photos on any iPhone case. Use our backgrounds, featured iPhone case art, or just create just about any custom iPhone case you can think of.

Every Type of Custom iPhone Case

Case Monkey specializes in adding brand new iPhone cases as soon the latest iPhones and their phone cases are available. After we know exactly what a new iPhone is going to look like and how various phone cases hold up, (tough iPhone cases vs. thin iPhone cases), we are able to offer the best customization possible for you to design your own iPhone case online. Case Monkey also has custom tablet cases, custom Samsung cases, and of course custom iPad cases. If you’re looking for strong tough cases or cases with heavier hand feel then Case Monkey has a ton of options. If you’re looking for a slim fit or thin shield case, or just looking for cheap iPhone cases with great shipping, then Case Monkey has a ton of iPhone case options.

Create iPhone Cases and Get Your Photos Prints on an iPhone Case!

Looking for that perfect personalized gift for just trying to get some inspirational quotes on an iPhone case? Case Monkey has the top tier iPhone case designer that allows you add your own text to any custom iPhone case. Need to add your business or logo to an iPhone case? No problem! Case Monkey has one of the best wholesale iPhone case and bulk iPhone case programs. Use the contact form to learn more about corporate programs. Design your own iPhone case and create custom cases online with Case Monkey!